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Shadows, Specters, Shards Making History in Avant-Garde Film Jeffrey Skoller |
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$75.00 Cloth |
Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film. Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films. Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling. “Shadows, Specters, Shards makes a strong case for the enduring value of avant-garde cinema—in all its abstraction—as a vital resource for thinking complexities of contemporary aesthetics, politics, poetics, and the relationships of history to the present.” —Octopus “Jeffrey Skoller addresses some of the richest, least acknowledged, avant-garde movies of the last three decades; in his scrupulous analysis these movies are revealed both as artifact and art work.” —J. Hoberman, film critic, The Village Voice “The material of this book is in large measure illustration of this central point by considering how movies by leading and influential avant-garde filmmakers have dealt with historical issues and material even though this has not been widely recognized or accepted.” —Midwest Book Review “This is a scholarly book—notes and bibliography are copious and thoroughgoing—but Skoller writes in a style that is precise, informative, and reasonably clear—even though he continually suggest meanings beyond what he is saying.” —Choice “Fascinating book. The great variety of films analyzed guarantees a well-balanced survey of what is at stake in the hardly known field of avant-garde movies.” —Leonardo “The book and its significant contributions to both historiography and avant-garde film studies.” —Afterimage "This volume provides an excellent discussion of films that deserve to be more widely known within film theorization of film’s potential for engaging viewers in alternative ways of engaging viewers in alternative ways of encountering history." —Journal of Film and Video “Aguirre’s engagement with this timely topic makes his text all the more appealing for museum studies, literary studies, and imperial history.” —Victorian Studies Filmmaker Jeffrey Skoller is associate professor of film, video, and new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 264 pages | 41 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2005 |
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$25.00 Paper